The Time of Release of Games and Apple's Plans to Use TSMC for Apple Silicon

The time of release of games through November 7th, 2020, is an important milestone that marks the expiration of many digital game codes. It can be a pain to redeem these codes, but it may have gotten better over time. As we move forward, Apple has been making plans to switch from Intel to AMD for its CPU-based silicon, while also exploring Arm-based silicon as an alternative. This move is part of Apple's efforts to create more efficient and powerful processors for its Mac products.

According to reports from Digitimes, TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) is expected to manufacture Apple's upcoming replacements for Intel-based silicon. This will be a significant partnership for TSMC, which has already been a top customer of Apple's. Given Apple's desire to utilize the most advanced node possible for its Apple Silicon, TSMC is likely the best choice. The report suggests that TSMC expects to ramp up production for Apple Silicon in the first half of 2021, with Apple reserving capacity for this purpose.

Apple has already reserved a large portion of TSMC's wafer sales for the first half of 2021, indicating the company's commitment to using TSMC for its future silicon needs. According to Nine to Five Mac, TSMC expects orders from Apple to account for a significant portion of its wafer sales in the first half of 2021. The report also suggests that TSMC is expecting orders to increase for Arm-based technology in the second half of 2021.

In related news, Apple is expected to introduce its first Arm-based machine this year, with rumors suggesting it may be a smaller MacBook or MacBook Air. However, some experts believe that we may see a proper Mac Pro by the end of 2021, featuring Arm-based silicon. Meanwhile, Corsair has launched the Corsair IQ Nexus, a touchscreen display designed for system monitoring and management.

The IQ Nexus is a companion touch screen that can be placed on your desk, providing various functions such as system performance monitoring, temperature displays, and customizable macro controls. The device features a 5-inch diagonal screen with a resolution of 640 x 48 pixels and supports up to 256 different screens that can be saved and swapped. Additionally, the Nexus has six buttons per screen, which can be programmed to change IQ settings like lighting, fan control, mouse DPI, and more.

The buttons on the Nexus can also be set to custom macro controls or launch applications, making it a useful tool for users who want to manage their system settings directly from their keyboard. The device is available on Corsair's website for $100, despite some criticism of its IQ software. The hardware solution looks interesting and may remind some users of old five-and-a-quarter bay devices.

Lastly, Razer has released the Huntsman Mini, a 60-key mechanical keyboard in the Huntsman line. The Huntsman Mini features RGB backlighting that can be controlled with either Razer Synapse or a series of preloaded lighting effects without Synapse running. Due to the 60 form factor's compromises on key count, many keys have secondary functions printed on the sides of the keycap facing the user.

The huntsman mini is available in both black and mercury white (as they call it) with Razer's red and purple optical mechanical key switches. The keyboard is priced at $120 with the purple switches or $130 with the red switches. That concludes our news recap for this week, as always, our show notes and sources document are linked in the description below. We also put the source websites on the screen and the b-roll if you want to check out any of the stories in more detail and can go to store.camerasaccess.net to support us directly by buying things like our new PC component shirt or backording the wireframe desk mats or the PC building service modmats.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everyone welcome back to another hardware news recap for the week and this one a lot of news like the intel i9 10 850 k intel really trying to get all the use that they can out of those numbers and letters and those long sku names also in the news 12 pin connectors for nvidia ampere cards but we have some additional information we've privately confirmed with several manufacturers at this point over the last month now on that story linus torvald's upset this time at avx 512 calling it a power virus we'll also be talking about jedeck finalizing the ddr5 spec and a couple of other news items for the week before that this video is brought to you by team group's t-force extreme argb memory which uses a frosted finish on its heatsink to diffuse the lighting across the surface the extreme argb kits are available in various xmp configurations including 3200 16 18 18 and 4018-2222 if you're looking for an argb memory kit for your next build check out the link in the description below for the tforce extreme memory super quick thing on a charity auction before we get into the news for the week so this is a computer that we reviewed for the nzxt bld undercover review series and we don't want it but we also didn't really want to buy it review and then return it we're trying to move away from that as we're able to financially support it more going forward so since we don't want the system we listed it for a charity auction on ebay we've linked it in the description below if you put a bid on this thing please only do so if you're actually going to buy it don't just try and drive the price up because what happens is if someone wins it and they can't pay then the whole thing has to be done over and it's a loss for everybody so uh we've been pretty successful the charity auction so far this one is benefiting cat angels which we have actually visited we built a computer for them they're local and we have plenty of b-roll of their facility featuring cats that we can show while we're talking about this but they're a no-kill shelter it rescues cats and then tries to find people to adopt them we think they do great work we've looked into them pretty heavily talked to them in person and all that stuff and we like what they do so the system's up it has a technical retail value of 1500 so that's the sum of the the cost of the parts the team is going to be autographing this side panel so far only patrick and i have signed it but we'll get everyone else on site to sign it as well and uh in the very least if you don't want the system maybe you can put the fully signed panel on the wall once we've got everyone's signature on it so that's a hundred percent of the uh auction value is going towards cat angels for this one and whoever wins we'll we'll send you a message and ask if you'd like any gn merch as well like a mouse mad or a modmat or something like that so i wanted to point that out first thank you for checking out the review of the nzxbld system but we don't want it anymore so feel free to contribute to the charity cause that we've linked below a quick live stream recap we normally do standalone videos for these but decided to just do this in the news video we did a 3900 xt extreme overclocking live stream where we took a 3900 xt we put under liquid nitrogen and then just did a few types of tests one of them was what's the highest frequency we could achieve and we ran into some points where we want to talk with some other overclockers and try and learn more about how can we bring the temperature down lower because we're getting stuck at minus 121 degrees celsius we couldn't bring it lower without uh a crash or a cold bug and so once we have an extra 70 degrees or so of headroom to bring the temperature down we should be able to increase the clocks even further but for now we got stuck at about 5.1 gigahertz all core for the 3900 xe it's definitely possible to do more it's a point of learning for us to try and push it even further but 5.1 was interesting because the voltages that we were able to run for those higher frequencies were significantly better than we've seen on some of the other ryzen chips so maybe there's something to this xt series being better bend but like we said in the reviews they're really mostly worth it for enthusiast class type of overclocking and not really worth it out of the box for standard use or even just lightweight overclocking so one of the things we saw was about 1.437 volts at 5 gigahertz which is crazy good we're running something like 1.35 get for uh clocks on the 4.8 4.9 gigahertz range which is also crazy good for all core now keep in mind that's at cold temperatures but even at only minus 60 or so we're still holding something like 1.35 volts get for those high frequencies so that's the quick recap we do have the stream archive on the channel if you want to catch it and then again a huge thanks to everyone from that stream who picked up our pc component shirt the mod match the mouse mats those latter two items are coming back into stock in august we just got these shipments arranged recently so if you want to support us doing more streams or buying more testing equipment like we've just done recently we'll be unveiling that new test equipment soon you can go to store.gamingtexas.net to buy things like the pc component shirt that's brand new and has been selling fast the x570 chipset metro poster the gm modmat for pc building services or the mouse mats let's move on to the next news item for this one there's been a rumor making the rounds lately about a 12-pin connector for the upcoming nvidia ampere cards and this is something first of all we can confirm that this thing exists it's not a rumor it's reality we've known about this 12-pin connector for about a month now and uh it's just it wasn't really something we thought was super newsworthy because it's a cable but apparently it is so we'll talk about it here with the information we've collected we collect a lot of this information from parties who are making products around this and we've spoken with some of the cable factories related to cable uh manufacturing to get more information but this week the rumor was about the 12-pin connectors from the power supply and something we saw super blown out of proportion was some of the maybe less technical sites covering this matter were basically saying that you're going to have to rip out half of your computer just to get the 12 pin supported and that's not really how it works because even if you look at the patent documents it's as simple as 12 volt cables and ground cables it's not like it's not like they're special for a 12-pin connector it's just that they're in different places maybe or more realistically uh it looks different and it's shaped differently and has a different key but it's still 12 volts in ground so not that hard to adapt it's not like you have to replace your power supply so anyway kind of irresponsible reporting when we saw some of those stories but the 12-pin connections for ampere are legitimate as we currently understand it it isn't likely to have an effect on the current diy or enthusiast space this is more of a product that's targeted towards the oems the sis and probably the reference cards but when in speaking with several of the custom card manufacturers even when they work with the initial reference boards which is a design that comes from nvidia they can still swap out the connectors uh pretty easily without having to do a whole bunch of custom designing so it sounds like the current plan is that this is mostly going to be an oem focus and si thing and there may be some cards that run with it but for the most part you can expect your standard cards from manufacturers we can't explicitly name but basically all the big manufacturers of nvidia video cards to come with uh a 2x8 pin connector you'll see some of them with setups that are maybe three by eight for the sort of higher overclocking configurations but they're not going with 12-pin for the most part we also know that this 12-pin connection has been in discussion at nvidia for a few years now so this isn't a new thing for amp here it's just that they happen to get around to it now so the 12-pin connection's been in discussion for a while our understanding is that the 12-pin can deliver something like 600 watts we need to look into if that number is including the the 75 watts on the pcie slot but it's from what we understand supposed to be a 600 watt maximum possible connection under spec keep in mind that the spec for connectors like six pin and eight pin connectors is often under what the cables are actually capable of delivering so it's on a conservatively low side so the numbers you see are normally underestimated for example two eight pins would do 375 watts or 300 watts plus the 75 from the pcie slot as an example 225 for two six pins and that also is uh counting the pcie x16 slot so the 12-pin thing is real our understanding is that some of the cable manufacturers are currently scrambling to get everything in place for it and one thing that we're not sure about but we're speculating as a possibility is that nvidia may supply uh some kind of special adapter just to look special with its cards the only reason we're really saying that is because nvidia is kind of going that apple direction where they're trying to just tack stuff on now to to be different when it doesn't it's literally apple's logo or slogan is it think different to try and be different when they don't really have to be when everything else has worked mostly fine up until now so they may do some kind of adapter or whatever but either way this is not something you need to worry about it's not going to massively change the way pc building works you're not going to have to buy new power supplies it's just 12 volts and ground in a different configuration so let's move on linus torvald calling avx 512 quote a power virus linus torvald is one of the top two linuses in this industry we're not again not sure which one comes up first if you just type line us into google but assuredly it's at least one of them and the resident curmudgeon in the tech community is linus torvalds so he's back with another hot take this time it has to do with alder lake possibly not supporting the ivx 512 instruction set and more on that in a moment linus torvalds if you're not familiar with the name is the creator and active kernel developer principal kernel developer for linux and his hot take here this time as is usually the case does not involve any mincing of words about his loathing for avx 512 quote i hope avx 512 dies a painful death and that intel starts fixing real problems instead of trying to create magic instructions to then create benchmarks that they can look good on i hope intel gets back to basics gets their process working again and concentrates more on regular code that isn't hpc or some other pointless special case torvald said via a mailing list via phoronix torvalds didn't stop there going on to say that quote avx 512 has real downsides i'd much rather see that transistor budget used on other things that are much more relevant even if it's still floating point math in the gpu rather than avx 512 or just give me more cores with good single thread performance but without the garbage like avx-512 like amd did and the rant continued with torvalds going as far to say i want my power limits to be reached with regular integer code not with some avx-512 power virus that takes away top frequency because people ended up using it for mem copy and takes away cores because those useless garbage units take up space scathing words then from linus torvalds but also not one who is a stranger to such words we can once again cue the nvidia clip with linus in it and nvidia has been the single worst company we've ever dealt with so nvidia you as for what avx 512 is abx-512 is a wider vector-based instruction set that intel has had in deployment now since at least 2013 and despite torvald's self-admittedly quote biased and grumpy rant it likely isn't going anywhere at least in the immediate future next one jedec finalizing the ddr5 spec over the last few months we've mentioned ddr5 looming on the horizon and now the jedec organization has finalized the specification publishing it as the jesde ddr5 sdram standard which you can read online or at least part of it frankly there's a lot to go through and it won't be entirely within the scope of just this news roundup so we'll recap it quickly one of the biggest changes for ddr5 is the doubled burst length to bl16 and doubling the bank count to 32. these are both numbers we've mentioned before when sk hynix detailed some of its early ddr5 specs previously the idea here is to increase memory access availability and allow for better memory scaling at higher frequencies without compromising channel efficiency as with previous ddr evolutions ddr5 will double data rates and offer a significant uplift in density some key points of note and takeaways ddr5 will support double bandwidth of ddr4 starting at 4.8 gigabits per second which is roughly a 50 increase over the end of life speed of 3.2 gigabits per second for ddr4 remember that the new iterations of ddr are always going to start at the low end so there are a few years of advancement for d4 there ddr5 will support a max data rate of 6.4 gigabits per second however as with current ddr4 that's likely to be exceeded sk hynex has plans for ddr5 8400 ddr5 will offer single memory chips up to 64 gigabits in density well beyond ddr4 is 16 gigabit maximum ddr5 also supports die stacking allowing dies to be eight dies to be stacked as a single chip and although this shouldn't need to be said it often does uh there are eight bits in a byte asterisk most of the time so when you hear gigabits or there's a lowercase b it's not the same as bytes with a capital b this is something that you'd be surprised how many people mess this up so keep that in mind uh other news udims will support up to 128 gigabytes ddr5 will now offer two 40 bit fully independent channels on the dim and burst length per channel is going from bl 8 to bl 16. ddr5 will also reportedly introduce a quote fine grain refresh feature we touched on this previously when sk hynix discussed its same bank refresh which allows the cpu to access certain memory banks while others are in operation or refreshing same idea here with the end goal being improving latency and memory bank access ddr5 is supposed to operate at 1.1 volts down from 1.2 on ddr4 you likely have seen 1.35 for most of your ddr4 xmp is technically not the spec for the memory even though the manufacturer might call it as such jedeck is what we're talking about here ddr5 will also employ an on dim voltage regulator and this likely has implications for the cost and the complexity of dimms going forward as well ddr5 is supposed to have an on die ecc and ddr5 also maintains the same 288 pin count as ddr4 but the pin out has changed so industry adoption is set to begin in 2021 as usual with new standards the server and enterprise markets will probably see first commercial adoption and client and consumer products will follow that later the initial versions of ddr5 may end up worse than the high-end versions of ddr4 but this is standard for the switchover and you typically see a latency of a couple years for full mass adoption on the market for a new memory standard even if the rollout is sooner than that we'll note as well if you want to read more details on ddr5 as it's known so far anandtech has a pretty detailed write-up and they've gone into more discussion with it as well so you can check out their write-up on the ddr5 specification next up rumors about alder lake and the alder lake hybrid computing uh construction not being able to use avx 512 or fp16 more and more it seems that the theory we've previously mentioned the one where alder lake will see intel makes both big and little cores could become a reality in a new leak by twitter user at 9950 pro a technical document from intel purportedly shows no fewer than three adl skus with different configurations the product mentioned with no official skus attached to them appear to show different big and little core arrangements and tdps of the cpus listed all are designated as alder lake s and two of them show an eight plus eight plus one listing the other cpu shows a six plus zero plus one listing according to the document these numbers illustrate eight big cores eight small cores and gt1 in the case of six plus zero plus one that'd be six big cores zero small and then gt1 or often graphics the document states that the big and small cores share the same instruction set and model specific registers and that when hybrid computing is enabled the available instruction sets are limited this appears to hint at the possibility that when using the mixture of big and small cores avx 512 and fp16 might actually not be enabled so those two instruction sets only seem to be available when strictly using just the big course so maybe linus torvalds will get at least a partial grant of his wish intel and the i9 10 850 k listing up next this is on pre-built sites now or at least was briefly by accident earlier this year with the release of intel's comet like s 10000 series processors we saw what seemed to be the full extent of what intel's 14 nanometer aged process could be pushed to with the flagship core i9 10 900k and that one boosted well beyond five gigahertz up to 5.3 with limited core boosting and tvb so a few asterisks there on that but still a high frequency and an old process that kind of binning could be hard to maintain though and this poses a challenge for intel which is already strapped for supply we've seen the result of this in the form of a shortage of the 10 900k across multiple marketplaces lasting from the time of the release a couple of months ago all the way through today now intel seems to be trying to alleviate the shortage by releasing a new series of processors and that might include this i9 10 850 k intel apparently wanting to let no numbers and letters go unscathed showing no no quarter for uh the alphabet or the numerical system uh is making sure it's really getting its money's worth for all that ink it's putting on the boxes so the 10850k appears to be essentially a 10 900k except 100 megahertz lower in both bass and boost clocks at least reportedly from what we've seen thus far so that would have a base clock of 3.6 and a boost of 5.2 while retaining all 10 cores and 20 threads from the 10 900k these processors were likely destined to be 10 900ks but maybe couldn't quite meet the volt frequency requirements to make the cut for such cpus so now they've been relabeled as 10 850 k's and sold for cheaper this is actually something of a reversal from what we saw in the amd 3000 xt launch where amd increased the prices almost universally by about a hundred dollars and then changed the frequencies in the positive direction a little bit for this one it looks like the pricing should decrease by about a hundred dollars with the frequency decreasing by about 100 megahertz so since we saw minimal gains from 100 megahertz swing in either direction the drop in price will likely prove more valuable than the frequency change itself this processor first appeared in benchmarks early this month but now has been more solidly confirmed as it's been spotted in a digital storm system configuration by twitter user mobimo underscore us our favorite leaker and probably the most wanted by all these companies according to the digital storm listing the 10850k will be 73 dollars more expensive than the 10700k placing the 10850k in the 450 price range which is 50 to 100 less than the 900k sells for when it's available now intel does do special cpus for just oems and si well oems at least so we're not sure if this will be exclusive to those partners or if it'll be diy purchasable but the existence of the processor is likely in either case to alleviate some of the difficulties of getting at least the the 10 900k because it'll be a strain reduction in the binning process and if it fills a role in oem and si then that's your 10 900k is going there so potentially 10900k will last on shelves longer with the 850k alongside it but we'll see skylake x reaches eol on this one with another week gone by we've got another wave of pcns or product change notifications to parse this week it seems intel skylake x is set to be retired for those keeping track of the various sky and lake cpus this is technically 9th gen silicon and is actually skylakex refresh skylak's refresh was already supplanted by cascade lake x some time ago and intel has even historically lowered prices on its hddt lines in sight of andy's aggressive threadripper offerings the skus set to make their exit are as follows the 9820x 9920x 9940x 9960x and 9980xe and the 9990xe all skylakex refresh skus were based on the basin falls refresh platform used the lga 2066 socket and required x299 chipset-based motherboards along with the skylake x refresh intel is also sun setting it's skylake w xeons or most of them anyway which makes sense because those have also been succeeded by cascade lake w zeons so if you decide you can't live without a skylake x refresh chip at this point you've got until january 22 2021 if you're a major retailer after that intel will ship final orders on july 9th of 2021. next up amd's new raise the game bundle amd often does these included game bundles for the most part these bundles aren't always something really worth paying attention to but hey if you're already looking at it cool it's not really something you should swing your entire decision based on since you're going to be stuck with a video card for a long time in the game maybe not but the first of these bundles includes the game godfall with the purchase of an rx 5500 series graphics card that would include the 5500 the xt variant and eligible 5500 laptops and he's also offering a bundle of godfall and world of warcraft shadowlands with the purchase of a 5600 or 5700 gpu on mobile and desktop platforms currently it looks like this is running from july 14th through october 3rd and the bundled titles will be redeemable uh from the time of release of the games through november 7th 2020 so it does expire and sometimes it can be a pain to redeem them but maybe it's gotten better next up apple looking to tsmc to build apple silicon something we've been covering the last two weeks of news unsurprisingly early reports out of digit times are suggesting that tsmc is on tap to manufacture apple's upcoming replacements of intel and potentially amd but intel for the cpu side and this would be for arm-based silicon that's destined to replace x86 and the apple mac products apple's already a top tsmc customer thanks to its a series socs and being that apple will want its apple silicon on the most advanced node possible tsmc is probably the best choice the report which is paywalled also suggests that tsmc is expecting to ramp production for apple silicon in the first half of 2021 as apple has reserved capacity according to nine to five mac tsmc is expecting apple's orders to account for a large portion of its wafer sales in the first half of 2021. digit times via nine to five max says a quote tsmc to see orders increase for arm-based max in second half 21. tsmc is expected to see orders for apple's max based on its arm-based silicon ramp up and contribute substantially to the foundries at wafer sales starting the second half of 21 according to industry sources apple is expected to introduce its first arm-based machine actually this year widely believed to be a smaller macbook or a macbook air however we may very well see a proper mac pro by the end of 2021 with the arm-based silicon in it and last up some quick product announcements that we saw this week in the pc hardware space so corsair launched the corsair iq nexus touch screen i wonder where they where they got inspiration for that name surely no one's ever seen that word before so corsair reports obviously that was a joke we know that's a generic word corsair purports this to be a companion touch screen for inclusion on your desk it's supposed to serve a variety of functions it's also expensive as you might expect for anything iq enabled but this seems to be similar to its elgato stream deck in some ways but with less of a focus on macro functionality and more of a focus on system monitoring and iq management the nexus has a 5 inch diagonal screen with a resolution of 640 by 48 pixels it's up to 256 different screens that can be saved and swapped on there with up to six buttons on each screen that can be programmed to change iq settings like lighting fan control mouse dpi and so on the buttons can also be set to custom macro controls or to launch applications and additionally screens can be used to display system performance and temperature through iq according to corsair this iq functionality can be used even without launching the iq client which is good because it sucks this might be enticing for some users if you want this stuff on your desk instead of the software open on the screen which should be most people the corsair nexus is available on corsair's website for a hundred dollars despite the knocks at iq the software the hardware solution looks interesting and kind of reminds us of those old five and a quarter bay devices next up razer and the huntsman mini so razer has released a new keyboard in the huntsman line in the form of the razer huntsman mini the huntsman mini is a sixty 60 mechanical keyboard which in case you're not familiar with the terminology is the smallest common keyboard form factor the huntsman mini has rgb backlighting that can be controlled with either razer synapse if you like a different taste of bloatware or with a series of preloaded lighting effects that can be cycled through without synapse running since the 60 form factor requires compromises in terms of the number of keys on the keyboard many of the keys on the huntsman mini have secondary functions that are printed on the sides of the keycap facing the user and can be used with a function key the huntsman mini is in both black and mercury white as they call it with razer's red and purple optical mechanical key switches it's on sale on razer's website starting at 120 bucks with the purple switches or 130 bucks with the red switches that's it for the news recap this week as always our show notes and sources document is linked in the description below we also put the source websites on the screen and the b-roll if you want to check out any of the stories in more detail and you can go to store.camerasaccess.net to support us directly by buying things like our new pc component shirt or backording the wireframe desk mats or the pc building service modmats thanks for watching subscribe for more we'll see you all next timehey everyone welcome back to another hardware news recap for the week and this one a lot of news like the intel i9 10 850 k intel really trying to get all the use that they can out of those numbers and letters and those long sku names also in the news 12 pin connectors for nvidia ampere cards but we have some additional information we've privately confirmed with several manufacturers at this point over the last month now on that story linus torvald's upset this time at avx 512 calling it a power virus we'll also be talking about jedeck finalizing the ddr5 spec and a couple of other news items for the week before that this video is brought to you by team group's t-force extreme argb memory which uses a frosted finish on its heatsink to diffuse the lighting across the surface the extreme argb kits are available in various xmp configurations including 3200 16 18 18 and 4018-2222 if you're looking for an argb memory kit for your next build check out the link in the description below for the tforce extreme memory super quick thing on a charity auction before we get into the news for the week so this is a computer that we reviewed for the nzxt bld undercover review series and we don't want it but we also didn't really want to buy it review and then return it we're trying to move away from that as we're able to financially support it more going forward so since we don't want the system we listed it for a charity auction on ebay we've linked it in the description below if you put a bid on this thing please only do so if you're actually going to buy it don't just try and drive the price up because what happens is if someone wins it and they can't pay then the whole thing has to be done over and it's a loss for everybody so uh we've been pretty successful the charity auction so far this one is benefiting cat angels which we have actually visited we built a computer for them they're local and we have plenty of b-roll of their facility featuring cats that we can show while we're talking about this but they're a no-kill shelter it rescues cats and then tries to find people to adopt them we think they do great work we've looked into them pretty heavily talked to them in person and all that stuff and we like what they do so the system's up it has a technical retail value of 1500 so that's the sum of the the cost of the parts the team is going to be autographing this side panel so far only patrick and i have signed it but we'll get everyone else on site to sign it as well and uh in the very least if you don't want the system maybe you can put the fully signed panel on the wall once we've got everyone's signature on it so that's a hundred percent of the uh auction value is going towards cat angels for this one and whoever wins we'll we'll send you a message and ask if you'd like any gn merch as well like a mouse mad or a modmat or something like that so i wanted to point that out first thank you for checking out the review of the nzxbld system but we don't want it anymore so feel free to contribute to the charity cause that we've linked below a quick live stream recap we normally do standalone videos for these but decided to just do this in the news video we did a 3900 xt extreme overclocking live stream where we took a 3900 xt we put under liquid nitrogen and then just did a few types of tests one of them was what's the highest frequency we could achieve and we ran into some points where we want to talk with some other overclockers and try and learn more about how can we bring the temperature down lower because we're getting stuck at minus 121 degrees celsius we couldn't bring it lower without uh a crash or a cold bug and so once we have an extra 70 degrees or so of headroom to bring the temperature down we should be able to increase the clocks even further but for now we got stuck at about 5.1 gigahertz all core for the 3900 xe it's definitely possible to do more it's a point of learning for us to try and push it even further but 5.1 was interesting because the voltages that we were able to run for those higher frequencies were significantly better than we've seen on some of the other ryzen chips so maybe there's something to this xt series being better bend but like we said in the reviews they're really mostly worth it for enthusiast class type of overclocking and not really worth it out of the box for standard use or even just lightweight overclocking so one of the things we saw was about 1.437 volts at 5 gigahertz which is crazy good we're running something like 1.35 get for uh clocks on the 4.8 4.9 gigahertz range which is also crazy good for all core now keep in mind that's at cold temperatures but even at only minus 60 or so we're still holding something like 1.35 volts get for those high frequencies so that's the quick recap we do have the stream archive on the channel if you want to catch it and then again a huge thanks to everyone from that stream who picked up our pc component shirt the mod match the mouse mats those latter two items are coming back into stock in august we just got these shipments arranged recently so if you want to support us doing more streams or buying more testing equipment like we've just done recently we'll be unveiling that new test equipment soon you can go to store.gamingtexas.net to buy things like the pc component shirt that's brand new and has been selling fast the x570 chipset metro poster the gm modmat for pc building services or the mouse mats let's move on to the next news item for this one there's been a rumor making the rounds lately about a 12-pin connector for the upcoming nvidia ampere cards and this is something first of all we can confirm that this thing exists it's not a rumor it's reality we've known about this 12-pin connector for about a month now and uh it's just it wasn't really something we thought was super newsworthy because it's a cable but apparently it is so we'll talk about it here with the information we've collected we collect a lot of this information from parties who are making products around this and we've spoken with some of the cable factories related to cable uh manufacturing to get more information but this week the rumor was about the 12-pin connectors from the power supply and something we saw super blown out of proportion was some of the maybe less technical sites covering this matter were basically saying that you're going to have to rip out half of your computer just to get the 12 pin supported and that's not really how it works because even if you look at the patent documents it's as simple as 12 volt cables and ground cables it's not like it's not like they're special for a 12-pin connector it's just that they're in different places maybe or more realistically uh it looks different and it's shaped differently and has a different key but it's still 12 volts in ground so not that hard to adapt it's not like you have to replace your power supply so anyway kind of irresponsible reporting when we saw some of those stories but the 12-pin connections for ampere are legitimate as we currently understand it it isn't likely to have an effect on the current diy or enthusiast space this is more of a product that's targeted towards the oems the sis and probably the reference cards but when in speaking with several of the custom card manufacturers even when they work with the initial reference boards which is a design that comes from nvidia they can still swap out the connectors uh pretty easily without having to do a whole bunch of custom designing so it sounds like the current plan is that this is mostly going to be an oem focus and si thing and there may be some cards that run with it but for the most part you can expect your standard cards from manufacturers we can't explicitly name but basically all the big manufacturers of nvidia video cards to come with uh a 2x8 pin connector you'll see some of them with setups that are maybe three by eight for the sort of higher overclocking configurations but they're not going with 12-pin for the most part we also know that this 12-pin connection has been in discussion at nvidia for a few years now so this isn't a new thing for amp here it's just that they happen to get around to it now so the 12-pin connection's been in discussion for a while our understanding is that the 12-pin can deliver something like 600 watts we need to look into if that number is including the the 75 watts on the pcie slot but it's from what we understand supposed to be a 600 watt maximum possible connection under spec keep in mind that the spec for connectors like six pin and eight pin connectors is often under what the cables are actually capable of delivering so it's on a conservatively low side so the numbers you see are normally underestimated for example two eight pins would do 375 watts or 300 watts plus the 75 from the pcie slot as an example 225 for two six pins and that also is uh counting the pcie x16 slot so the 12-pin thing is real our understanding is that some of the cable manufacturers are currently scrambling to get everything in place for it and one thing that we're not sure about but we're speculating as a possibility is that nvidia may supply uh some kind of special adapter just to look special with its cards the only reason we're really saying that is because nvidia is kind of going that apple direction where they're trying to just tack stuff on now to to be different when it doesn't it's literally apple's logo or slogan is it think different to try and be different when they don't really have to be when everything else has worked mostly fine up until now so they may do some kind of adapter or whatever but either way this is not something you need to worry about it's not going to massively change the way pc building works you're not going to have to buy new power supplies it's just 12 volts and ground in a different configuration so let's move on linus torvald calling avx 512 quote a power virus linus torvald is one of the top two linuses in this industry we're not again not sure which one comes up first if you just type line us into google but assuredly it's at least one of them and the resident curmudgeon in the tech community is linus torvalds so he's back with another hot take this time it has to do with alder lake possibly not supporting the ivx 512 instruction set and more on that in a moment linus torvalds if you're not familiar with the name is the creator and active kernel developer principal kernel developer for linux and his hot take here this time as is usually the case does not involve any mincing of words about his loathing for avx 512 quote i hope avx 512 dies a painful death and that intel starts fixing real problems instead of trying to create magic instructions to then create benchmarks that they can look good on i hope intel gets back to basics gets their process working again and concentrates more on regular code that isn't hpc or some other pointless special case torvald said via a mailing list via phoronix torvalds didn't stop there going on to say that quote avx 512 has real downsides i'd much rather see that transistor budget used on other things that are much more relevant even if it's still floating point math in the gpu rather than avx 512 or just give me more cores with good single thread performance but without the garbage like avx-512 like amd did and the rant continued with torvalds going as far to say i want my power limits to be reached with regular integer code not with some avx-512 power virus that takes away top frequency because people ended up using it for mem copy and takes away cores because those useless garbage units take up space scathing words then from linus torvalds but also not one who is a stranger to such words we can once again cue the nvidia clip with linus in it and nvidia has been the single worst company we've ever dealt with so nvidia you as for what avx 512 is abx-512 is a wider vector-based instruction set that intel has had in deployment now since at least 2013 and despite torvald's self-admittedly quote biased and grumpy rant it likely isn't going anywhere at least in the immediate future next one jedec finalizing the ddr5 spec over the last few months we've mentioned ddr5 looming on the horizon and now the jedec organization has finalized the specification publishing it as the jesde ddr5 sdram standard which you can read online or at least part of it frankly there's a lot to go through and it won't be entirely within the scope of just this news roundup so we'll recap it quickly one of the biggest changes for ddr5 is the doubled burst length to bl16 and doubling the bank count to 32. these are both numbers we've mentioned before when sk hynix detailed some of its early ddr5 specs previously the idea here is to increase memory access availability and allow for better memory scaling at higher frequencies without compromising channel efficiency as with previous ddr evolutions ddr5 will double data rates and offer a significant uplift in density some key points of note and takeaways ddr5 will support double bandwidth of ddr4 starting at 4.8 gigabits per second which is roughly a 50 increase over the end of life speed of 3.2 gigabits per second for ddr4 remember that the new iterations of ddr are always going to start at the low end so there are a few years of advancement for d4 there ddr5 will support a max data rate of 6.4 gigabits per second however as with current ddr4 that's likely to be exceeded sk hynex has plans for ddr5 8400 ddr5 will offer single memory chips up to 64 gigabits in density well beyond ddr4 is 16 gigabit maximum ddr5 also supports die stacking allowing dies to be eight dies to be stacked as a single chip and although this shouldn't need to be said it often does uh there are eight bits in a byte asterisk most of the time so when you hear gigabits or there's a lowercase b it's not the same as bytes with a capital b this is something that you'd be surprised how many people mess this up so keep that in mind uh other news udims will support up to 128 gigabytes ddr5 will now offer two 40 bit fully independent channels on the dim and burst length per channel is going from bl 8 to bl 16. ddr5 will also reportedly introduce a quote fine grain refresh feature we touched on this previously when sk hynix discussed its same bank refresh which allows the cpu to access certain memory banks while others are in operation or refreshing same idea here with the end goal being improving latency and memory bank access ddr5 is supposed to operate at 1.1 volts down from 1.2 on ddr4 you likely have seen 1.35 for most of your ddr4 xmp is technically not the spec for the memory even though the manufacturer might call it as such jedeck is what we're talking about here ddr5 will also employ an on dim voltage regulator and this likely has implications for the cost and the complexity of dimms going forward as well ddr5 is supposed to have an on die ecc and ddr5 also maintains the same 288 pin count as ddr4 but the pin out has changed so industry adoption is set to begin in 2021 as usual with new standards the server and enterprise markets will probably see first commercial adoption and client and consumer products will follow that later the initial versions of ddr5 may end up worse than the high-end versions of ddr4 but this is standard for the switchover and you typically see a latency of a couple years for full mass adoption on the market for a new memory standard even if the rollout is sooner than that we'll note as well if you want to read more details on ddr5 as it's known so far anandtech has a pretty detailed write-up and they've gone into more discussion with it as well so you can check out their write-up on the ddr5 specification next up rumors about alder lake and the alder lake hybrid computing uh construction not being able to use avx 512 or fp16 more and more it seems that the theory we've previously mentioned the one where alder lake will see intel makes both big and little cores could become a reality in a new leak by twitter user at 9950 pro a technical document from intel purportedly shows no fewer than three adl skus with different configurations the product mentioned with no official skus attached to them appear to show different big and little core arrangements and tdps of the cpus listed all are designated as alder lake s and two of them show an eight plus eight plus one listing the other cpu shows a six plus zero plus one listing according to the document these numbers illustrate eight big cores eight small cores and gt1 in the case of six plus zero plus one that'd be six big cores zero small and then gt1 or often graphics the document states that the big and small cores share the same instruction set and model specific registers and that when hybrid computing is enabled the available instruction sets are limited this appears to hint at the possibility that when using the mixture of big and small cores avx 512 and fp16 might actually not be enabled so those two instruction sets only seem to be available when strictly using just the big course so maybe linus torvalds will get at least a partial grant of his wish intel and the i9 10 850 k listing up next this is on pre-built sites now or at least was briefly by accident earlier this year with the release of intel's comet like s 10000 series processors we saw what seemed to be the full extent of what intel's 14 nanometer aged process could be pushed to with the flagship core i9 10 900k and that one boosted well beyond five gigahertz up to 5.3 with limited core boosting and tvb so a few asterisks there on that but still a high frequency and an old process that kind of binning could be hard to maintain though and this poses a challenge for intel which is already strapped for supply we've seen the result of this in the form of a shortage of the 10 900k across multiple marketplaces lasting from the time of the release a couple of months ago all the way through today now intel seems to be trying to alleviate the shortage by releasing a new series of processors and that might include this i9 10 850 k intel apparently wanting to let no numbers and letters go unscathed showing no no quarter for uh the alphabet or the numerical system uh is making sure it's really getting its money's worth for all that ink it's putting on the boxes so the 10850k appears to be essentially a 10 900k except 100 megahertz lower in both bass and boost clocks at least reportedly from what we've seen thus far so that would have a base clock of 3.6 and a boost of 5.2 while retaining all 10 cores and 20 threads from the 10 900k these processors were likely destined to be 10 900ks but maybe couldn't quite meet the volt frequency requirements to make the cut for such cpus so now they've been relabeled as 10 850 k's and sold for cheaper this is actually something of a reversal from what we saw in the amd 3000 xt launch where amd increased the prices almost universally by about a hundred dollars and then changed the frequencies in the positive direction a little bit for this one it looks like the pricing should decrease by about a hundred dollars with the frequency decreasing by about 100 megahertz so since we saw minimal gains from 100 megahertz swing in either direction the drop in price will likely prove more valuable than the frequency change itself this processor first appeared in benchmarks early this month but now has been more solidly confirmed as it's been spotted in a digital storm system configuration by twitter user mobimo underscore us our favorite leaker and probably the most wanted by all these companies according to the digital storm listing the 10850k will be 73 dollars more expensive than the 10700k placing the 10850k in the 450 price range which is 50 to 100 less than the 900k sells for when it's available now intel does do special cpus for just oems and si well oems at least so we're not sure if this will be exclusive to those partners or if it'll be diy purchasable but the existence of the processor is likely in either case to alleviate some of the difficulties of getting at least the the 10 900k because it'll be a strain reduction in the binning process and if it fills a role in oem and si then that's your 10 900k is going there so potentially 10900k will last on shelves longer with the 850k alongside it but we'll see skylake x reaches eol on this one with another week gone by we've got another wave of pcns or product change notifications to parse this week it seems intel skylake x is set to be retired for those keeping track of the various sky and lake cpus this is technically 9th gen silicon and is actually skylakex refresh skylak's refresh was already supplanted by cascade lake x some time ago and intel has even historically lowered prices on its hddt lines in sight of andy's aggressive threadripper offerings the skus set to make their exit are as follows the 9820x 9920x 9940x 9960x and 9980xe and the 9990xe all skylakex refresh skus were based on the basin falls refresh platform used the lga 2066 socket and required x299 chipset-based motherboards along with the skylake x refresh intel is also sun setting it's skylake w xeons or most of them anyway which makes sense because those have also been succeeded by cascade lake w zeons so if you decide you can't live without a skylake x refresh chip at this point you've got until january 22 2021 if you're a major retailer after that intel will ship final orders on july 9th of 2021. next up amd's new raise the game bundle amd often does these included game bundles for the most part these bundles aren't always something really worth paying attention to but hey if you're already looking at it cool it's not really something you should swing your entire decision based on since you're going to be stuck with a video card for a long time in the game maybe not but the first of these bundles includes the game godfall with the purchase of an rx 5500 series graphics card that would include the 5500 the xt variant and eligible 5500 laptops and he's also offering a bundle of godfall and world of warcraft shadowlands with the purchase of a 5600 or 5700 gpu on mobile and desktop platforms currently it looks like this is running from july 14th through october 3rd and the bundled titles will be redeemable uh from the time of release of the games through november 7th 2020 so it does expire and sometimes it can be a pain to redeem them but maybe it's gotten better next up apple looking to tsmc to build apple silicon something we've been covering the last two weeks of news unsurprisingly early reports out of digit times are suggesting that tsmc is on tap to manufacture apple's upcoming replacements of intel and potentially amd but intel for the cpu side and this would be for arm-based silicon that's destined to replace x86 and the apple mac products apple's already a top tsmc customer thanks to its a series socs and being that apple will want its apple silicon on the most advanced node possible tsmc is probably the best choice the report which is paywalled also suggests that tsmc is expecting to ramp production for apple silicon in the first half of 2021 as apple has reserved capacity according to nine to five mac tsmc is expecting apple's orders to account for a large portion of its wafer sales in the first half of 2021. digit times via nine to five max says a quote tsmc to see orders increase for arm-based max in second half 21. tsmc is expected to see orders for apple's max based on its arm-based silicon ramp up and contribute substantially to the foundries at wafer sales starting the second half of 21 according to industry sources apple is expected to introduce its first arm-based machine actually this year widely believed to be a smaller macbook or a macbook air however we may very well see a proper mac pro by the end of 2021 with the arm-based silicon in it and last up some quick product announcements that we saw this week in the pc hardware space so corsair launched the corsair iq nexus touch screen i wonder where they where they got inspiration for that name surely no one's ever seen that word before so corsair reports obviously that was a joke we know that's a generic word corsair purports this to be a companion touch screen for inclusion on your desk it's supposed to serve a variety of functions it's also expensive as you might expect for anything iq enabled but this seems to be similar to its elgato stream deck in some ways but with less of a focus on macro functionality and more of a focus on system monitoring and iq management the nexus has a 5 inch diagonal screen with a resolution of 640 by 48 pixels it's up to 256 different screens that can be saved and swapped on there with up to six buttons on each screen that can be programmed to change iq settings like lighting fan control mouse dpi and so on the buttons can also be set to custom macro controls or to launch applications and additionally screens can be used to display system performance and temperature through iq according to corsair this iq functionality can be used even without launching the iq client which is good because it sucks this might be enticing for some users if you want this stuff on your desk instead of the software open on the screen which should be most people the corsair nexus is available on corsair's website for a hundred dollars despite the knocks at iq the software the hardware solution looks interesting and kind of reminds us of those old five and a quarter bay devices next up razer and the huntsman mini so razer has released a new keyboard in the huntsman line in the form of the razer huntsman mini the huntsman mini is a sixty 60 mechanical keyboard which in case you're not familiar with the terminology is the smallest common keyboard form factor the huntsman mini has rgb backlighting that can be controlled with either razer synapse if you like a different taste of bloatware or with a series of preloaded lighting effects that can be cycled through without synapse running since the 60 form factor requires compromises in terms of the number of keys on the keyboard many of the keys on the huntsman mini have secondary functions that are printed on the sides of the keycap facing the user and can be used with a function key the huntsman mini is in both black and mercury white as they call it with razer's red and purple optical mechanical key switches it's on sale on razer's website starting at 120 bucks with the purple switches or 130 bucks with the red switches that's it for the news recap this week as always our show notes and sources document is linked in the description below we also put the source websites on the screen and the b-roll if you want to check out any of the stories in more detail and you can go to store.camerasaccess.net to support us directly by buying things like our new pc component shirt or backording the wireframe desk mats or the pc building service modmats thanks for watching subscribe for more we'll see you all next time\n"